I have the honor to be selected as one of 2018 DiGRA Distinguished Scholars. In 2016 DiGRA established the Distinguished Scholars program to recognize senior scholars in the field of game studies who have been at the forefront of the development of rigorous scholarship, the establishment of game studies and game development programs, and who … Read more 2018 DiGRA Distinguished Scholar

Petri Lankoski, D.Arts, is an Associate Professor in Game Studies at the Södertörn University, Sweden. Curriculum Vitae Publications Games Research interest: methods in game design research game design research game characters and character-driven game design aesthetics and the philosophy of games applications of cognitive sciences (cognitive emotion theories, embodied cognition, empathy) to game research My current teaching includes Introduction to … Read more About

Game design aims to solve a design problem of “how do we create this specific game?” The main goal of this process is a game; new understanding about game development and game design is merely a by-product of that process. In game design research the aim is to uncover new facts and insight about game design, design processes, or games as designed objects; that is, to gain new knowledge and understanding about game design. Game research, on the other hand, is an umbrella term for all kinds of research studying games (as artifacts), play, or players (cf. Lankoski and Björk, 2015b)Design research, or design studies as it is also called, has been gaining momentum since the beginning of 20th century, although its history can be traced back millennia (e.g., Aristotle’s Poetics, circa 335 BCE and Vitruvius’ De architectura circa 15 BCE). While the history of games is long, little is known about the design of early games. Some information about evolution of certain games exists (e.g., Parker, 2006). Elizabeth Magie’s Landlord’s game (1903) is one of the early examples where there is data about its design, such as that the game is designed based on an economical theory by Henry George.

I reread Brühlmann and Schmid’s (2015) article where they evaluate PENS scale and noticed that they found issues with the reversed worded (E1) and argued that the scale quality benefit removing or rephrasing the item. I used all presence scale items in my embodiment analysis published in MindTrek.

I collected also workload data using raw Nasa TLX when gathering data for EFA and CFA, but then I did not use workload data in analyses. My assumption was that workload would correlate with the embodiment, but did not look at this.

The paper is presented at AcademicMindtrek’16, October 17-18, 2016, Tampere, Finland (c) 2016 ACM. ISBN978-1-4503-4367-1/16/10… and published in the conference proceedings.

Abstract

Embodiment is used to denote the sense that something is a part of one’s body. The sense of own body is argued to relate to the sense of agency of one’s own actions and of the ownership of the body. In this sense of own body can incorporate something external to the body, such as simple tools or virtual hands. The premise of the study is that the player-characters and game controllers get embodied in a similar to a tool or a virtual hand. In order to study embodiment, a psychometric scale is developed using explorative factor analysis (n=104). The scale is evaluated with two sets of data (n=103 and n=89) using confirmatory factor analysis. The embodiment scale ended to having two dimensions: controller ownership and player-character embodiment. Finally, the embodiment scale is tested and put into action in two studies with hypotheses 1) embodiment and players’ skills correlate and 2) the sense of presence and embodiment correlate. The data (n=37 and n=31) analysed using mixed effects models support both hypotheses.